Home to Big Stone Gap
Millions of readers around the world have fallen in love with
the novels of the New York Times bestselling author Adriana Trigiani. In
Home to Big Stone Gap, she tells her most powerful story yet, full of humor
and heart, wisdom and hope.
Nestled in the lush Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the
town of Big Stone Gap has been home for Ave Maria Mulligan Machesney and her
family for generations. She’s been married to her beloved Jack for nearly
twenty years, raised one child and buried another, and run a business that
binds her community together, all while holding her tight circle of family
and friends close.
But with her daughter, Etta, having flown the nest to
enchanting Italy, Ave Maria has reached a turning point. When a friend’s
postcard arrives with the message “It’s time to live your life for you,” Ave
Maria realizes that it’s time to go in search of brand-new dreams. But
before she can put her foot on the path, her life is turned upside down.
Ave Maria agrees to helm the town musical, a hilarious
reunion of local talent past and present. A lifelong friendship collapses
when a mysterious stranger comes to town and reveals a long-buried secret.
An unexpected health crisis threatens her family. An old heartthrob
reappears, challenging her marriage and offering a way out of her troubles.
An opportunistic coal company comes to town and threatens to undermine the
town’s way of life and the mountain landscape Ave Maria has treasured since
she was a girl. Now she has no choice but to reinvent her world, her life,
and herself, whether she wants to or not.
Trigiani is at her best in this exquisite page-turner. Home to Big Stone Gap
is an emotional and unforgettable journey that reminds us that you can go
home again and again.
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Big Stone Gap
 It's
1978, and Ave Maria Mulligan is the thirty-five-year-old self-proclaimed
spinster of Big Stone Gap, a sleepy hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains of
Virginia. She's also the local pharmacist, the co-captain of the Rescue
Squad, and the director of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, the town's
long-running Outdoor Drama. Ave Maria is content with her life of doing
errands and negotiating small details-until she discovers a skeleton in her
family's formerly tidy closet that completely unravels her quiet,
conventional life. Suddenly, she finds herself juggling two marriage
proposals, conducting a no-holds-barred family feud, planning a
life-changing journey to the Old Country, and helping her best friend, the
high-school band director, design a halftime show to dazzle Elizabeth
Taylor, the violet-eyed Hollywood movie star who's coming through town on a
campaign stump with her husband, senatorial candidate John Warner.
Filled with big-time eccentrics and small-town
shenanigans, Big Stone Gap is a jewel box of original characters, including
sexpot Bookmobile librarian Iva Lou Wade; Fleeta Mullins, the chain-smoking
pharmacy cashier with a penchant for professional wrestling; the dashing
visionary Theodore Tipton; Elmo Gaspar, the snake-handling preacher; Jack
MacChesney, a coal-mining bachelor looking for truelove; and Pearl Grimes, a
shy mountain girl on the verge of a miraculous transformation.
Comic and compassionate, Big Stone Gap is the story of a
woman who thinks life has passed her by, only to learn that the best is yet
to come. |
Big Cherry Holler
 BIG CHERRY HOLLER,
the extraordinary sequel to BIG STONE GAP, takes us back to the mountain
life that enchanted us in Adriana Trigiani’s best selling debut novel.
It’s been eight years since the town pharmacist and long time spinster
Ave Maria Mulligan married coal miner Jack MacChesney. With her new
found belief in love and its possibilities, Ave Maria makes a life for
herself and her growing family, hoping that her fearless leap into
commitment will make happiness stay. What she didn’t count on was that
fate, life, and the ghosts of the past would come to haunt her and,
eventually, test the love she has for her husband. The mountain walls
that have protected her all of her life can not spare Ave Maria the life
lessons she must learn. BIG CHERRY HOLLER is the story of a marriage,
revealing the deep secrets, the power struggle, the betrayal and the
unmet expectations that exist between husband and wife. It is the story
of a community that must reinvent itself as it comes to grips with the
decline of the coal mining industry. It is the story of an extended
family, the people of Big Stone Gap, who are there for one another
especially when times are tough—including bookmobile librarian and
sexpert Iva Lou Wade Makin, savvy businesswoman Pearl Grimes, crusty
cashier Fleeta Mullins, and Rescue Squad captain Spec Broadwater, who
faces the complications of his double life. Ave Maria’s best friend
Theodore Tipton, now band director at the University of Tennessee,
continues to be her chief counselor and conscience as he reaches the
pinnacle of marching band success. When Ave Maria takes her daughter to
Italy for the summer, she meets a handsome stranger who offers her a
life beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ave Maria is forced to confront
what is truly important: to her, to her marriage, and to her family.
Brimming with humor, wisdom, honesty, and the drama and local color of
mountain life from Virginia to Italy, BIG CHERRY HOLLER is a deeply
felt, brilliantly evoked story of two lovers who have lost their way and
their struggle to find one another again.
From Random House:
www.randomhouse.com |
About the Author:
Adriana Trigiani grew up in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, in
the 1970s. She has honed her storytelling abilities over a decade of writing
and producing some of television's top-rated shows, including the
groundbreaking Cosby Show. Trigiani is also an award-winning playwright and
documentary filmmaker. She lives in New York City with her husband.
These books, published by Random House,
are available through most bookstores
Mutual Pharmacy
A Big Stone Gap business featured in this book
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Milk Glass Moon
Milk Glass Moon, the third book in Adriana Trigiani's bestselling Big
Stone Gap series, continues the life story of Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney
as she faces the challenges and changes of motherhood with her trademark
humor and honesty. With twists as plentiful as those found on the holler
roads of southwest Virginia, this story takes turns that will surprise and
enthrall the reader.
Transporting us from Ave Maria's home in the Blue Ridge Mountains to the
Italian Alps, from New York City to the Tuscan countryside, Milk Glass
Moon is the story of a shifting mother-daughter relationship, of
a daughter's first love and a mother's heartbreak, of an enduring marriage
that contains its own ongoing challenges, and of a community faced with
seismic change.
All of Trigiani's beloved characters are back: Jack Mac, Ave Maria's true
love, who is willing to gamble security for the unknown; her best friend and
confidant, bandleader Theodore Tip-ton, who begins a new life in New York
City; librarian and sexpert Iva Lou Wade Makin, who faces a life-or-death
crisis. Meanwhile, surprises emerge in the blossoming of crusty cashier
Fleeta Mullins, the maturing of mountain girl turned savvy businesswoman
Pearl Grimes, and the return of Pete Rutledge, the handsome stranger who
turned Ave Maria's world upside down in Big Cherry Holler.
In this rollicking hayride of upheaval and change, Ave Maria is led to
places she never dreamed she would go, and to people who enter her life and
rock its foundation. As Ave Maria reaches into the past to find answers to
the present, readers will stay with her every step of the way, rooting for
the onetime town spinster who embraced love and made a family. Milk Glass
Moon is about the power of love and its abiding truth, and
captures Trigiani at her most lyrical and heartfelt.
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